CEN16LA349 · Piper PA 28-180
Piper PA 28-180 · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) en route
From Levelland Municipal Airport (LLN) to Four Corners Regional Airport (FMN)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16LA349
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Piper PA 28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N9241J
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Levelland Municipal Airport (LLN), Levelland, TXTo Four Corners Regional Airport (FMN), Farmington, NM
- Aircraft age
- About 50 years (built 1966)
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- En route · cruise
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Loss of engine power (partial)
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Tree(s)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot and passenger departed on a night cross-country flight using flight following. About 2 hours after departure, the engine suddenly lost partial power. The pilot checked the engine gauges, which were all in the green, and advised air traffic control (ATC) of the loss of engine power. The pilot switched fuel tanks, then activated the carburetor heat. He tried switching magnetos and enriching the mixture for "a few seconds." He then leaned the mixture again and "deactivated the carb heat," all with no changes observed in engine power. The pilot declared an emergency with ATC and used his tablet computer's navigation application to align the airplane over a road. Upon touchdown, the airplane's wing impacted a guardrail, and the airplane subsequently nosed over. Although weather conditions at the nearest weather reporting facility about 50 miles from the accident site were conducive to the accumulation of serious carburetor icing at cruise power, the investigation could not determine whether the loss of power was a result of carburetor ice, and no postaccident examination of the engine was conducted to rule out other causes.
Probable cause
A partial loss of engine power for reasons that could not be determined based on available information.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16LA349
- Event ID
- 20160906X24001
- Case number
- CEN16LA349
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: fb00c61e6a80f952666d2be90fae220bdef662d316593774648e55047a5b88df; retrieved 2026-09-16T04:13:24.310Z.